Louis XIV. ruled everywhere, over his people, over his age, often over
Europe; but nowhere did he reign so completely as over his court. Never
were the wishes, the defects and the vices of a man so completely a law
to other men as to the court of Louis XIV. during the whole period of
his long life. When near to him, in the palace of Versailles, men lived
and hoped and trembled; everywhere else in France, even at Paris, men
vegetated. The existence of the great lords was concentrated in the
court, about the person of the king. Scarcely could the most important
duties bring them to absent themselves for any time. They returned
quickly, with alacrity, with ardor; only poverty or a certain rustic
pride kept gentlemen in their provinces. “The court does not make one
happy,” says La Bruyère, “it prevents one from being so anywhere else.”
The principle of absolute power, firmly fixed in the young king’s mind,
began to pervade his court from the time that he disgraced Fouquet and
ceased to dissemble his affection for Mdlle. de La Vallière. She was
young, charming and modest. Of all the king’s favorites she alone loved
him sincerely. “What a pity he is a king!” she would say. Louis XIV. made
her a duchess; but all she cared about was to see him and please him.
When Madame de Montespan began to supplant her in the king’s favor, the
grief of Madame de La Vallière was so great that she thought she should
die of it. Then she turned to God, in penitence and despair; and, later
on, it was at her side that Madame de Montespan, in her turn forced to
quit the court, went to seek advice and pious consolation. “This soul
will be a miracle of grace,” Bossuet had said.
Madame de Montespan was haughty, passionate, “with hair dressed in a
thousand ringlets, a majestic beauty to show off to the ambassadors;” she
openly paraded the favor she was in, accepting and angling for the graces
the king was pleased to do her and hers, having the superintendence of
the household of the queen, whom she insulted without disguise, to the
extent of wounding the king himself: “Pray consider that she is your
mistress,” he said one day to his favorite. The scandal was great;
Bossuet attempted the task of stopping it. It was the time of the
Jubilee; neither the king nor Madame de Montespan had lost all religious
feeling; the wrath of God and the refusal of the sacraments had terrors
for them still.
Bossuet had acted in vain, “like a pontiff of the earliest times, with
a freedom worthy of the earliest ages and the earliest bishops of the
Church,” says St. Simon. He saw the inutility of his efforts; henceforth
prudence and courtly behavior put a seal upon his lips. It was the time
of the great king’s omnipotence and highest splendor, the time when
nobody withstood his wishes. The great Mademoiselle had just attempted
to show her independence; tired of not being married, she had made up
her mind to a love-match; she did not espouse Lauzun just then, the
king broke off the marriage. “I will make you so great,” he said to
Lauzun, “that you shall have no cause to regret what I am taking from
you; meanwhile, I make you duke and peer and marshal of France.” “Sir,”
broke in Lauzun insolently, “you have made so many dukes that it is no
longer an honor to be one, and, as for the bâton of marshal of France,
your Majesty can give it me when I have earned it by my services.” He
was before long sent to Pignerol, where he passed ten years. There he
met Fouquet and that mysterious personage called the Iron Mask, whose
name has not yet been discovered to a certainty by means of all the
most ingenious conjectures. It was only by settling all her property on
the duke of Maine after herself that Mademoiselle purchased Lauzun’s
release. The king had given his posts to the prince of Marcillac, son of
La Rochefoucauld.
Louis XIV. entered benevolently into the affairs of a marshal of France;
he paid his debts, and the marshal was his _domestic_; all the court
had come to that; the duties which brought servants in proximity to
the king’s person were eagerly sought after by the greatest lords.
Bontemps, his chief valet, and Fagon, his physician, as well as his
surgeon Maréchal, very excellent men too, were all-powerful amongst the
courtiers. Louis XIV. possessed the art of making his slightest favors
prized; to hold the candlestick at bed-time (_au petit coucher_), to
appear in the trips to Marly, to play in the king’s own game, such
was the ambition of the most distinguished; the possessors of grand
historic castles, of fine houses at Paris, crowded together in attics
at Versailles, too happy to obtain a lodging in the palace. The whole
mind of the greatest personages, his favorites at the head, was set upon
devising means of pleasing the king; Madame de Montespan had pictures
painted in miniature of all the towns he had taken in Holland; they were
made into a book which was worth four thousand pistoles, and of which
Racine and Boileau wrote the text; people of tact, like M. de Langlée,
paid court to the master through those whom he loved.
All the style of living at court was in accordance with the magnificence
of the king and his courtiers; Colbert was beside himself at the sums
the queen lavished on play. Madame de Montespan lost and won back four
millions in one night at bassette; Mdlle. de Fontanges gave away twenty
thousand crowns’ worth of New Year’s gifts. A new power, however, was
beginning to appear on the horizon, with such modesty and backwardness
that none could as yet discern it, least of all could the king. Madame
de Montespan had looked out for some one to take care of and educate her
children. She had thought of Madame Scarron; she considered her clever;
she was so herself, “in that unique style which was peculiar to the
Mortemarts,” said the duke of St. Simon; she was fond of conversation;
Madame Scarron had a reputation for being rather a blue-stocking; this
the king did not like; Madame de Montespan had her way; Madame Scarron
took charge of the children secretly and in an isolated house. She was
attentive, careful, sensible. The king was struck with her devotion
to the children entrusted to her. “She can love,” he said; “it would
be a pleasure to be loved by her.” This expression plainly indicated
what was to happen; and Madame de Montespan saw herself supplanted by
Madame Scarron. The widow of the deformed poet had bought the estate
of Maintenon out of the king’s bounty. He made her take the title. The
recollection of Scarron was displeasing to him.
The queen had died on the 30th of July, 1683, piously and gently as she
had lived. “This is the first sorrow she ever caused me,” said the king,
thus rendering homage, in his superb and unconscious egotism, to the
patient virtue of the wife he had put to such cruel trials. Madame de
Maintenon was agitated but resolute. “Madame de Montespan has plunged
into the deepest devoutness,” she wrote, two months after the queen’s
death: “It is quite time she edified us; as for me, I no longer think
of retiring.” Her strong common-sense and her far-sighted ambition, far
more than her virtue, had secured her against rocks ahead; henceforth she
saw the goal, she was close upon it, she moved toward it with an even
step. The date has never been ascertained exactly of the king’s private
marriage with Madame de Maintenon. It took place probably eighteen months
or two years after the queen’s death; the king was forty-seven, Madame de
Maintenon fifty. “She had great remains of beauty, bright and sprightly
eyes, an incomparable grace,” says St. Simon, who detested her, “an air
of ease and yet of restraint and respect, a great deal of cleverness with
a speech that was sweet, correct, in good terms and naturally eloquent
and brief.”
Madame de La Vallière had held sway over the young and passionate heart
of the prince, Madame de Montespan over the court, Madame de Maintenon
alone established her empire over the man and the king. Alone she had
any part in affairs, a smaller part than has frequently been made out,
but important, nevertheless, and sometimes decisive. Ministers went
occasionally to do their work in her presence with the king, who would
turn to her when the questions were embarrassing, and ask, “What does
your Solidity think?” The opinions she gave were generally moderate and
discreet. Whatever the apparent reserve and modesty with which it was
cloaked, the real power of Madame de Maintenon over the king’s mind
peeped out more and more into broad daylight. She promoted it dexterously
by her extreme anxiety to please him as well as by her natural and
sincere attachment to the children whom she had brought up and who had a
place near the heart of Louis XIV.
The chief ornament of the Court of Versailles was the duchess of
Burgundy. For the king and for Madame de Maintenon, the great and
inexhaustible attraction of this young lady was her gaiety and
unconstrained ease, tempered by the most delicate respect, which, on
coming as quite a child to France from the court of Savoy, she had
tact enough to introduce and always maintain amidst the most intimate
familiarity. “In public, demure, respectful with the king, and on terms
of timid propriety with Madame de Maintenon, whom she never called
anything but _aunt_, thus prettily blending rank and affection. In
private, chattering, frisking, fluttering around them, at one time
perched on the arm of one or the other’s chairs, at another playfully
sitting on their knee, she would throw herself upon their necks, embrace
them, kiss them, fondle them, pull them to pieces, chuck them under the
chin, tease them, rummage their tables, their papers, their letters,
reading them sometimes against their will, according as she saw that they
were in the humor to laugh at it, and occasionally speaking thereon.
Admitted to everything, even at the reception of couriers bringing the
most important news, going in to the king at any hour, even at the time
the council was sitting, useful and also fatal to ministers themselves,
but always inclined to help, to excuse, to benefit, unless she were
violently set against any body. The king could not do without her; when,
rarely, she was absent from his supper in public, it was plainly shown by
a cloud of more than usual gravity and taciturnity over the king’s whole
person; and so, when it happened that some ball in winter or some party
in summer made her break into the night, she arranged matters so well
that she was there to kiss the king the moment he was awake and to amuse
him with an account of the affair” [_Mémoires de St. Simon_].
The dauphiness had died in 1690; the duchess of Burgundy was, therefore,
almost from childhood queen of the court, and before long the idol of the
courtiers; it was around her that pleasure sprang up; it was for her that
the king gave the entertainments to which he had habituated Versailles,
not that for her sake or to take care of her health he would ever consent
to modify his habits or make the least change in his plans. “Thank God,
it is over,” he exclaimed one day, after an accident to the princess; “I
shall no longer be thwarted in my trips, and in all I desire to do, by
the representations of physicians. I shall come and go as I fancy; and I
shall be left in peace.” Even in his court and amongst his most devoted
servants, this monstrous egotism astounded and scandalized everybody.
Flattery, at Versailles, ran a risk of becoming hypocrisy. On returning
to a regular life, the king was for imposing the same upon his whole
court; the instinct of order and regularity, smothered for a while in the
hey-day of passion, had resumed all its sway over the naturally proper
and steady mind of Louis XIV. His dignity and his authority were equally
involved in the cause of propriety and regularity at his court; he
imposed this yoke as well as all the others; there appeared to be entire
obedience; only some princes or princesses escaped it sometimes, getting
about them a few free-thinkers or boon-companions; good, honest folks
showed ingenuous joy; the virtuous and far-sighted were secretly uneasy
at the falsehood and deplored the pressure put on so many consciences
and so many lives. The king was sincere in his repentance for the past,
many persons in his court were as sincere as he; others, who were not,
affected, in order to please him, the externals of austerity; absolute
power oppressed all spirits, extorting from them that hypocritical
complaisance which it is liable to engender; corruption was already
brooding beneath appearances of piety; the reign of Louis XV. was to see
its deplorable fruits displayed with a haste and a scandal which are to
be explained only by the oppression exercised in the last years of King
Louis XIV.
Madame de Maintenon was like the genius of this reaction toward
regularity, propriety, order; all the responsibility for it has been
thrown upon her; the good she did has disappeared beneath the evil she
allowed or encouraged; the regard lavished upon her by the king has
caused illusions as to the discreet care she was continually taking to
please him. She was faithful to her friends, so long as they were in
favor with the king; if they had the misfortune to displease him, she,
at the very least, gave up seeing them; without courage or hardihood
to withstand the caprices and wishes of Louis XIV., she had gained and
preserved her empire by dint of dexterity and far-sighted suppleness
beneath the externals of dignity.
It was through Madame de Maintenon and her correspondence with the
princess des Ursins that the private business between the two courts
of France and Spain was often carried on. At Madrid far more than at
Versailles, the influence of women was all powerful. The queen ruled her
husband, who was honest and courageous, but without wit or daring; and
the princess des Ursins ruled the queen, as intelligent and as amiable as
her sister the duchess of Burgundy, but more ambitious and more haughty.
Louis XIV. had several times conceived some misgiving of the camarera
major’s influence over his grandson; she had been disgraced and then
recalled; she had finally established her sway by her fidelity, ability,
dexterity, and indomitable courage. She served France habitually, Spain
and her own influence in Spain always; she had been charming, with an air
of nobility, grace, elegance and majesty all together, and accustomed to
the highest society and the most delicate intrigues, during her sojourn
at Rome and Madrid; she was full of foresight and calculation, but
impassioned, ambitious, implacable, pushing to extremes her amity as well
as her hatred, faithful to her master and mistress in their most cruel
trials, and then hampering and retarding peace for the sake of securing
for herself a principality in the Low Countries.
But the time came for Madame des Ursins to make definitive trial
of fortune’s inconstancy. After having enjoyed unlimited power and
influence, with great difficulty she obtained an asylum at Rome, where
she lived seven years longer, preserving all her health, strength, mind
and easy grace until she died, in 1722, at more than eighty-four years
of age, in obscurity and sadness, notwithstanding her opulence, but
avenged of her Spanish foes, Cardinals della Giudice and Alberoni, whom
she met again at Rome, disgraced and fugitive like herself. “I do not
know where I may die,” she wrote to Madame de Maintenon, at that time in
retirement at St. Cyr. Both had survived their power; the princess des
Ursins had not long since wanted to secure for herself a dominion; Madame
de Maintenon, more far-sighted and more modest, had aspired to no more
than repose in the convent which she had founded and endowed. Discreet
in her retirement as well as in her life, she had not left to chance the
selection of a place where she might die.
“One has no more luck at our age,” Louis XIV. had said to his old friend,
Marshal Villars, returning from his most disastrous campaign. It was a
bitter reflection upon himself which had put these words into the king’s
mouth. After the most brilliant, the most continually and invariably
triumphant of reigns, he began to see fortune slipping away from him
and the grievous consequences of his errors successively overwhelming
the state. “God is punishing me, I have richly deserved it,” he said
to Marshal Villars, who was on the point of setting out for the battle
of Denain. The aged king, dispirited and beaten, could not set down to
men his misfortunes and reverses; the hand of God himself was raised
against his house; death was knocking double knocks all round him. The
grand-dauphin had for some days past been ill of small-pox; he died
in April, 1711; the duchess of Burgundy was carried off by an attack
of malignant fever in February, 1712; her husband followed her within
a week, and their eldest child, the duke of Brittany, about a month
afterward.
There was universal and sincere mourning in France and in Europe. The
most sinister rumors circulated darkly; a base intrigue caused the duke
of Orleans to be accused; people called to mind his taste for chemistry
and even magic, his flagrant impiety, his scandalous debauchery; beside
himself with grief and anger, he demanded of the king to be sent to the
Bastile; the king refused curtly, coldly, not unmoved in his secret heart
by the perfidious insinuations which made their way even to him, but too
just and too sensible to entertain a hateful lie, which, nevertheless,
lay heavy on the duke of Orleans to the end of his days.
Darkly, but to more effect, the same rumors were renewed before long.
The duke of Berry died at the age of twenty-seven, on the 4th of May,
1714, of a disease which presented the same features as the scarlet
fever (_rougeole pourpréc_), to which his brother and sister-in-law had
succumbed. The king was old and sad; the state of his kingdom preyed upon
his mind; he was surrounded by influences hostile to his nephew, whom
he himself called “a vaunter of crimes.” A child who was not five years
old remained sole heir to the throne. Madame de Maintenon, as sad as the
king, “naturally mistrustful, addicted to jealousies, susceptibilities,
suspicions, aversions, spites, and woman’s wiles” [_Lettres de Fénelon
au duc de Chevreuse_], being, moreover, sincerely attached to the king’s
natural children, was constantly active on their behalf. On the 19th
of July, 1714, the king announced to the premier president and the
attorney-general of the parliament of Paris that it was his pleasure to
grant to the duke of Maine and to the count of Toulouse, for themselves
and their descendants, the rank of princes of the blood, in its full
extent, and that he desired that the deed should be enregistered in the
parliament. Soon after, still under the same influence, he made a will
which was kept a profound secret, and which he sent to be deposited in
the strong-room (_greffe_) of the parliament, committing the guardianship
of the future king to the duke of Maine, and placing him, as well as his
brother, on the council of regency, with close restrictions as to the
duke of Orleans, who would be naturally called to the government of the
kingdom during the minority. The will was darkly talked about; the effect
of the elevation of bastards to the rank of princes of the blood had been
terrible. “There was no longer any son of France; the Spanish branch
had renounced; the duke of Orleans had been carefully placed in such a
position as not to dare say a word or show the least dissatisfaction; his
only son was a child; neither the duke (of Berry), his brothers, nor the
prince of Conti, were of an age, or of standing, in the king’s eyes, to
make the least trouble in the world about it. The bombshell dropped all
at once when nobody could have expected it, and everybody fell on his
stomach, as is done when a shell drops; everybody was gloomy and almost
wild; the king himself appeared as if exhausted by so great an effort of
will and power.” He had only just signed his will, when he met, at Madame
de Maintenon’s, the ex-queen of England. “I have made my will, Madame,”
said he; “I have purchased repose; I know the impotence and uselessness
of it; we can do all we please as long as we are here; after we are
gone, we can do less than private persons; we have only to look at what
became of my father’s, and immediately after his death too, and of those
of so many other kings. I am quite aware of that; but, in spite of all
that it was desired; and so, Madame, you see it has been done; come of
it what may, at any rate I shall not be worried about it any more.” It
was the old man yielding to the entreaties and intrigues of the domestic
circle; the judgment of the king remained steady and true, without
illusions and without prejudices.
Death was coming, however, after a reign which had been so long, and had
occupied so much room in the world, that it caused mistakes as to the
very age of the king. He was seventy-seven, he continued to work with his
ministers; the order so long and so firmly established was not disturbed
by illness any more than it had been by the reverses and sorrows of late.
He said to Madame de Maintenon once, “What consoles me for leaving you,
is that it will not be long before we meet again.” She made no reply.
“What will become of you?” he added: “you have nothing.” “Do not think of
me,” said she: “I am nobody; think only of God.” He said farewell to her;
she still remained a little while in his room, and went out when he was
no longer conscious. She had given away here and there the few movables
that belonged to her, and now took the road to St. Cyr. On the steps she
met Marshal Villeroy: “Good bye, marshal,” she said curtly and covered
up her face in her coifs. He it was who sent her news of the king to the
last moment. The duke of Orleans, on becoming regent, went to see her and
took her the patent (_brevet_) for a pension of sixty thousand livres,
“which her disinterestedness had made necessary for her,” said the
preamble. It was paid her up to the last day of her life. History makes
no further mention of her name; she never left St. Cyr. Thither the czar
Peter the Great, when he visited Paris and France, went to see her; she
was confined to her bed; he sat a little while beside her. “What is your
malady?” he asked her through his interpreter. “A great age,” answered
Madame de Maintenon, smiling. He looked at her a moment in silence; then,
closing the curtains, he went out abruptly. The memory he would have
called up had vanished. The woman on whom the great king had, for thirty
years, heaped confidence and affection was old, forgotten, dying; she
expired at St. Cyr on the 15th of April, 1719, at the age of eighty-three.
She had left the king to die alone. He was in the agonies; the prayers
in extremity were being repeated around him; the ceremonial recalled him
to consciousness. He joined his voice with the voices of those present,
repeating the prayers with them. Already the court was hurrying to the
duke of Orleans; some of the more confident had repaired to the duke of
Maine’s; the king’s servants were left almost alone around his bed; the
tones of the dying man were distinctly heard above the great number of
priests. He several times repeated: “_Nunc et in hora mortis_.” Then
he said quite loud: “O my God, come thou to help me, haste thee to
succor me.” Those were his last words. He expired on Sunday, the 1st of
September, 1715, at eight a. m. Next day he would have been seventy-seven
years of age, and he had reigned seventy-two of them.
In spite of his faults and his numerous and culpable errors, Louis XIV.
had lived and died like a king. The slow and grievous agony of olden
France was about to begin.